Andrew D. White, first president of Cornell University, was a bookish man -- a scholar who knew, loved and collected books. Though the university's founder, Ezra Cornell, was not bookish, he appreciated the value and necessity of assembling a proper library for the students and faculty of the university that was to bear his name.

When Cornell opened its doors in the fall of 1868, its library of about 18,000 volumes was temporarily housed in two rooms of Morrill Hall, the first building on what is now the Arts Quadrangle. Earlier that year President White had traveled through Europe seeking items for the university's new library. Back in Ithaca, Willard Fiske, Cornell's first librarian, worked to ensure that the university's collections would be, above all, a practical reference library. In his day Fiske was an innovative librarian and kept the library open nine hours a day, longer than any other American university library. Cornell Library was probably the first intended for extensive use by undergraduates as well as by the faculty. In the 1800s even the most established university library played a relatively insignificant role in the intellectual life of students -- mostly because they were rarely open.

The materials White and Fiske acquired covered almost the whole range of the humanities and provided the nucleus for most of Cornell Library's great early collections. Today there are 102 collections that have the Research Libraries Group's "conspectus five" status, a rank reserved for collections of the greatest importance to the nation's scholars; most libraries have only a handful. Based on the number of volumes in its collections, Cornell University Library is one of the dozen largest academic research libraries in the United States. It contains more than 5.8 million volumes, subscribes to about 61,500 periodicals, owns 6.8 million microforms, adds more than 120,000 volumes to its collections each year, and comprises 19 libraries throughout the university. Last year Cornell librarians conducted 4.8 million electronic searches for students and scholars.

The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is located underground in the Carl A. Kroch Library, three stories below the Arts Quadrangle. Here, in state-of-the-art, climate- controlled conditions, 300,000 printed books, more than 70 million manuscripts and another million photographs, paintings, prints and other visual media are available for students and scholars to use for their class work or research projects.

The recently acquired Johnson Family Papers, containing letters written by Abigail and John Adams to family members, can be found among collections that chronicle such fields as medieval and Renaissance studies, the Reformation, 18th- century France and England, American history, Anglo-American literature, Icelandic history and culture and the history of science. Other collections focus on agriculture, ornithology, witchcraft, women's studies, human sexuality, graphic arts and architecture and city planning.

But the Cornell Library is a great deal more than a repository of information. It is still -- first and foremost -- a living, working, ever-expanding scholarly resource open year-round for students, teachers and researchers from around the world.

Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White and Willard Fiske undoubtedly would gaze with wonder and pride at the library they established. They might also be pleased to learn that as Cornell Library anticipates the future, it is successfully using the latest technologies to make its growing resources more readily available to users. Catalogs and databases can be accessed at computer terminals in every campus library and from offices, laboratories and homes (24 hours a day); the Department of Preservation and Conservation initiated the "Making of America" project to convert much of America's recorded history, crumbling into dust due to aging paper, into digital form to preserve the documents and make them available to scholars and students via the Internet; and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has created a Web site (http://rmc-www.library.cornell.edu) of a "virtual expedition" that provides access to information about the 1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska through text, maps, images and sounds.

Cornell's founders envisioned "an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Now -- as then -- outstanding and accessible library resources are crucial to the university that would achieve that purpose.